Emeritus Prof. Dr. Chris Elbers is an economist whose research focus is on impact evaluation, measurement and small-area estimation of poverty and inequality, and the economics of growth and risk. He is currently a member of the board of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development, of the European Union Development Network, and a fellow of the Tinbergen Institute. He has also been director of the Amsterdam Institute for International Development and Desmond Tutu Chair Holder of The School of Business and Economics. Last year he retired as a professor from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU).

Since 1984, he has been a member of the Development Research Group in the Economics department at the VU. The Development Research Group focuses on applied microeconomic research in developing countries, in particular countries in Sub-Sahara Africa. He studied econometrics and mathematical economics at the University of Amsterdam and got his PhD from the VU. Most of his work is on applied econometrics using micro-level data.  In the 1990s, he elaborated, together with Jenny and Peter Lanjouw, the original idea of combining census and survey data to obtain predictions of local poverty, ‘poverty mapping’, and since then has been working on and off on this and related topics, often commissioned by the World Bank. Other work, jointly with Jan Willem Gunning, involved household-level investment dynamics and impact evaluation.